Welcome!

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

New community/locales added

Javanese and Sundanese locales have been added to Firefox Rocket and are now launching in Indonesia. Congrats to these new teams and to their new localizers! Come check out the Friends of the Lion section below for more information on who they are.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

There are currently few strings landing in Nightly, making it a good time to catch up (if your localization is behind), or test your work. Focus in particular on certificate errors and preferences, given the amount of changes happening around Content blocking, Privacy and Security. The deadline to ship any localization update in Beta (Firefox 63) is October 9.

It’s been a while since we talked about Fluent, but that doesn’t mean that the migration is not progressing. Expect a lot of files moving to Fluent in the coming weeks, thanks to the collaboration with students from the Michigan University.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Activate Mozilla

The Activate Mozilla campaign aims at the grassroots of volunteer contributions. The initiative wants to bring more clarity on what are the most important areas to contribute to at Mozilla right now by providing guidance to mobilizers on how to recruit contributors and create community around meaningful Mozilla projects.

The project is added to Pontoon in a few required languages, with opt-in option for other languages. Once the completion reaches 95%, the locale will be enabled on production. There is no staging server, and any changes in Pontoon will be synced up and pushed to production directly.

Mozilla.org

Mozilla.org has a new tracking protection tour that highlights the content blocking feature. The update is ready for localization, and the tour will be available on production in early October.

Common Voice

The new home page was launched earlier this month. It is only available for 50% of the users during the A/B testing phase. The new look will roll out to all users in the next sprint. The purpose of this redesign is to convert more visitors to the site to contribute. We hope the new looking will help improve the conversion rate we currently have, which is between 10-15%. Though the change doesn’t increase more localization work at string level, the team believes it will bring more people to donating their voices to established locales.

If your language is not available on the current site, the best way to make a request is through Pontoon by following these step-by-step instructions. To learn more about Common Voice project and discussions, check them out on Discourse.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

A very quick update on the fundraising campaign: the September fundraiser is being sent out in English and localization will start very soon

Read more about the “Top 20 Articles” sprint for several locales here.

Firefox Reality content has been added to the Knowledge Base, but there is no need to localize it for now.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

New homepage. The new homepage was designed and developed by Pramit Singhi as part of Google Summer of Code. Apart from the new design, it also brings several important content changes. It presents Pontoon as the place to localize Mozilla projects, explains the “whys” and “hows” of localization at Mozilla in general, brings a clear call to action, and moves in-context localization demo to a separate page.

Guided tour. Another product of Google Summer of Code is a guided tour of Pontoon, designed and developed by an experienced Pontoon contributor Vishal Sharma. It’s linked from the homepage as a secondary call to action, and consists of two pieces: the actual tour, which explains the translation user interface, and the tutorial project, which demonstrates more details through carefully chosen strings.

System projects. Vishal also developed the ability to mark projects as “system projects”, which are hidden from dashboards. The aforementioned Tutorial project and Pontoon Intro are both treated as system projects.

Read-only locales. Last month we enabled locales previously not in Pontoon, in read-only mode. That means dashboards and the API now present full project status across all locales, all Mozilla translations are accessible in the Locales tab, and the Translation Memory of locales previously not available in Pontoon has improved. Check out the newsgroup for more details on which locales were enabled for which projects.

Unchanged filter improvement. Thanks to Raivis Dejus, the Unchanged filter now works as expected. Previously, it returned all strings for which the source string is the same as one of the suggestions. Now, it only compares source strings with active translations (show in the string list).

Pontoon tips

Here’s a quick Pontoon tip that a lot of people already know, but can still help some.

Pontoon has a feature that automatically identifies specific elements in strings, highlights them and makes them clickable. Here’s an example:

This feature is meant to allow you to easily copy placeables into your translation by clicking them. This saves you time and reduces the risk of introducing typos if you manually rewrite them, or partially select them while copy/pasting them.

One common misconception is to think those elements should always be kept in English. While it’s certainly true in multiple cases (variables, HTML tags like in the screenshot above…), there are several places where Pontoon highlights parts of a string that could or should be translated.

Here’s an example where all the highlighted elements should be translated:

Here Pontoon thinks those words are acronyms, and that you could potentially keep them in your translation. It turns out here they are not acronyms, it’s just a sentence in full caps, so we can simply ignore the highlights and translate it like any other string.

Here’s a last example where Pontoon successfully detects an acronym, and it could have been kept but the localizer decided to translate it anyway (and it’s okay):

To summarize the feature, Pontoon does its best to guess what parts of a string you are likely to keep in your translation, but these are suggestions only.

Also remember, you’re not alone! If you have a doubt, you can always reach out to the l10n PM owning the project. They will clarify the context for you and help you better identify false positives.

Events

Jakarta (Indonesia) Rocket Sprint held on August 11-12 added two new languages to the product. Javanese contributor Akhlis summarized the weekend activity with his blog.